The overall capacities of broadband satellites are increasing exponentially, and such capacity increases present unique challenges in the associated ground system and network designs. The goal of the system designers, system operators, and service providers is to support and provide efficient, robust, reliable and flexible services, in a shared bandwidth network environment, utilizing such high capacity satellite systems.
According to recent internet traffic studies, media streaming traffic (e.g., video streaming) makes up more than 50% of forward link bandwidth from servers to client devices, where as much as 35% of such traffic is from Netflix servers. Further, the trend is moving upwards as more and more content providers start offering media (e.g., video) streaming services. For example, recent additions include HBO, CBS and other network and content provider streaming services. With regard to such streaming traffic, studies also show that the Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) applies to most of the content, where 20% of the overall available content makes up upwards of 80% or more of the overall content streamed over the Internet. In other words, the same content is repeatedly transmitted (over and over again) at different times and to different client requestors, which results in extremely inefficient use of forward link transmission resources (from the content servers to the users), which resources are continually becoming ever more scarce and more expensive. In fact, data regarding one of the top video streaming services shows that 10% of streamed movie titles makes up close to 80% of the providers overall streaming video delivery. In addition to video streaming, software updates of large software companies (e.g., Apple and Microsoft) also tend to hog Internet traffic resources during peak delivery times of new updates. For example, the recent iOS 8 updates provided by Apple, upon release, almost instantly became approximately 16% of total network traffic during peak hours and continued to stay above 13% of total traffic into evening hours. Also, with such software updates (e.g., Apple iOS and Microsoft Windows updates), a large number of users are downloading the same content at different times within a relatively short time period.
What is needed, therefore, is one or more approaches that provide for efficient use of forward transmission resources of a broad-based communications system for the delivery of popular high-demand streaming content (of large file sizes) to multiple users at different times.